WRITE THIS WHILE YOU CAN

WRITE THIS WHILE YOU CAN 

By Charles E. Kraus

There is a "2016 To Do" list on my office bulletin board, several lists really — to do, titles of books I wish to read, people I need to contact; also:  

WRITE THIS WHILE YOU CAN

Beneath the heading we find several topics I might yet tackle.

1. The Reduction of Writer Friends From My Generational Queue. The demise of

aging friends, ultimately, of me. Too grim? I’ll explore this once I am dead, an entirely

new perspective, death as seen from the point-of-view of a participant.

2. Rereading and Reevaluating — that’s a subject I might get to in 2016.   How over and over again, when returning to an old favorite, some book or film I admired back in my collective past, I am disappointed — by the work, by my having been attracted to the work, and/or for having spent years as a propagandist urging others to appreciate the wonders I now reject.  Did you know that Holden became a CPA? That the Chicago Seven opened a restaurant?  That when I first saw A Thousand Clowns, Murray was my hero, and that when I last saw it, I cried for his deficiencies?  It is impossible to reread without considering the fate of the author.  Bellow lasted too long and went to the other side of reason. Salinger became a paranoid bully.  Kerouac took the wrong road.

3. My Involvement In the War gets listed as two separate writing projects -- fiction and memoir.  Probably I should stick to the facts as I misremember them.  I was distracted when I signed the enlistment papers.  If I finally write it down, will I learn why I took the alternative route?

WRITE THIS WHILE YOU CAN is my reminder.   Whatever the topic, Charles, do some serious writing while you are still able to string words. Before stringing involves beads. Thoughts used to jump around in my head, colliding, fighting for superior position, making the cut, surviving an edit or two, ending up on a final draft. Currently, my musings resist symbolic representation.  Words no longer compete; they acquiesce.  Before my impressions get shipped off to a back burner in subsets of subsets of my mind, while they continue to be accessible, if only with great effort, dangled into consciousness on a quick peek, short term, lend lease basis, I’d like to send them into the game.

Samuel Clemens dictated reminisces long after his inner-editor ceased to function.

That’s a perfectly good way to ruin a reputation. And yet, there are, there were, there are, new

combinations I want to add to the cumulative count.  

DOCUMENTING OUR LIVES

DOCUMENTING OUR LIVES

By Charles E. Kraus

As a child growing up in the 1950s, the visual impressions that I had about how I looked, how I moved, how I appeared to others, came primarily from peering into a mirror.  Turn a bit to the left, to the right — so that’s how they see me.  A three panel mirror was state of the art insight.  I was protected from detailed analysis by the realization that restricted by my position relative to the mirror, there were limits to what got revealed.  Still, some things were obvious.  My head was small, long, more cube than sphere.  My hair!  I’d asked the barber to make me look like Presley, not Harpo. 

Our family camera was a boxy affair only retrieved from my father’s desk drawer for special occasions - celebrations, beach outings, visits from distant relatives.  The black and white results let you see images of yourself set in a variety of situations;.  Happy or sad, anxious or fearful, you were required to smile.  The photographs were an embarrassment, but also instructive.  I sure as hell was not going to be caught in that shirt again!

By the time I saw the 8mm silent film version of little old me, I was a college student, the sequence shot for a class project.  Who was the gawky kid with the Groucho walk, tipped forward bounding ahead on the balls of his feet?  In high school, we’d made fun of Brucie Babtox because he tried to prance like a hood.  Turned out, I walked the same way.  

Similar revelations occurred on the audio playing field.  In junior high, our voices were recorded by Mrs. Lascary.  I believe this had something to do with poetry.  I recognized every voice, but one.  My friends sounded exactly like my friends.  But my voice?  That’s not me, not how I talked.  I had … could it be true … a New York accent.

Cut to my granddaughter, Alice.  She is two.  Like many of her contemporaries, she is extremely well documented.  Just about everything Alice does — brush her teeth, mush up her strawberries, roll in the grass — gets recorded by Mom or Dad.   Every time Alice learns a new word, it is captured for posterity.  She lives in Menlo Park.  We live in Seattle.  Daily video installments arrive, as if a camera crew has been following our granddaughter around waiting for something interesting to happen.  Remarkably, it always does.

The viewership for these recordings includes, but is not limited to Alice’s adult fan club.  She’s a fan, too.  She splits her limited screen time between viewing Elmo and watching videos of her exploits.  Her parents restrict her media adventures because they want her to play with her toys, to do art projects, interact with friends, even old fashioned stuff like going on a family walk.  This approach to growing up has my vote.  

But, there is no such thing as merely taking a walk, or drawing a picture.  The walk is memorialized.  The picture photographed, copies sent to grandparents and other cheering sections.  The documentation gets reviewed by Alice.  When we were in town, we took a picture of her standing next to Cookie Monster decked out in his Christmas best.  During our short stay, Alice retrieved that shot dozens of times.  She was obviously trying to work out some thoughts or feelings about meeting up with one of her screen idols.

Will today's youngsters, so accustomed to seeing themselves as other see them, make corrections and adjustments to perfect their worldly impact?  Is the information they receive about who and how they are going to have a positive or negative impact on who or how they will be?  

I’m old fashioned, so I’ll answer the question by saying we’ll have to wait and see what develops. 

Quaking in Place

Quaking in Place

By Charles E. Kraus

Seattle ---   I moved to the west coast just about 45 years ago.   When I think of New York, I envision the city as it existed in 1970.  In those days, if you wanted to encourage someone to talk about themselves, you said, “what’s shaking?”

Recently, The New Yorker Magazine, of all publications, told us what’s shaking here in Seattle.   According to Kathryn Shultz’s article, The Really Big One, what’s shaking, or will be soon, is a long stretch of California, Oregon and Washington coast, the Cascadia subduction zone.  She singles out Portland and Seattle for special deconstructability.

Shultz’s piece cannot be dismissed as sensationalism.  It is published in a magazine that fact checks and verifies everything from commas to continental drift.  It is not only a respected magazine, it is evidently a very well read one.  More than a dozen people, folks I met in Seattle, Portland, LA, people I spoke with from New York, Baltimore and Texas, have brought up the quake story.  Some ask, ‘so, what are you going to do?’  It’s a reasonable question, but not an easy one to answer.

Obviously, individual responses to news that staying put just might be lethal, is going to vary depending upon a person’s situation.  Single, married, employed, home owner, parent, elderly.  Part of a community, someone who’s spent a lifetime perfecting a house, a business, a reputation.  If I were 25, just getting a foothold on my future, I’d move that future to higher less potentially unstable ground.  Such a decision would be prudent.  At that age, you have less stuff, fewer commitments, and a belief in nice long tomorrows.

My wife and I are 70, or close to it.  Our home is literally on a hill.   It is unlikely that a tsunami will wreak havoc on the property.  It’s a wood frame house, well anchored, and though it might just ride out a 9+  Big One, we’d have to be home to benefit from any potential protection.  Not downtown.  Not by the harbor, not visiting in Portland, shopping in Edmonds.  Not frequenting any of the places that comprise our Seattle lives.   Now that I think about it, we are pretty close to Lake Washington, a mighty body of water.  Will it jump the shoreline?  And what would that look like?  Maybe we shouldn’t picnic down by the lake.

Evidently, many of the facts that Shultz reports are not newly minted.  Though I’d never read ­about subduction zones, seismologists are familiar with the concept, and with Pacific Northwest’s unstable situation.  OK, so why did it take a New Yorker article to bring the topic to the local dinner table discussion circuit?

Realtors tell you property value is all about location.  Evidently, so do seismologists.  It turns out that when you are trying to decide if you should move because the kids are about to enter school and you want to find a “good” school district, you need to think about more than test scores.   Have you ever even discussed earthquakes with your kids?

Years ago, when Boeing found itself in bad times, people left this city without saying goodbye.  Houses were abandoned, personal property stacked at the curb.  Leaving is an option.  It’s been done.  I suppose the question becomes, is staying an option?  And if we stick around, are we merely waiting for the inevitable?  Wondering if tonight, or next month, or perhaps not for a hundred years, this place is going to experience a massive adjustment.

Do we turn our backs on reality, just go on living our lives, heads in the sand, magical thinking a group process.  Or will our city and state governments declare a state of potential emergency, install the early warning systems, move schools to higher ground, keep the conversation going.  Will the public, you and I, treat the situation as anything more than a passing headline?   What’s shaking?

The Theory of Early Silliness Education

The Theory of Early Silliness Education
By Charles Kraus


I've been performing comedy routines for children since .. oh, let's not go back prior to 1957.   Initially, I was a kid magician attempting to project a very serious attitude.  I wanted audiences to take me in ernest --  Boy Wonder and all.  But it turned out, I was funny, so I went with it. Eleven thousand shows latter, I'm still performing.

People often ask if audiences -- meaning the kids -- have changed, if children laugh at different things.  My response is that what was funny "then" is funny now.

Entertainers, philosophers, scientists, psychologists, essayists -- Aristotle to Steve Allen, (from A to A) -- have all taken stabs explaining "funny."  Their conclusions are more complex than mine.  If it makes you laugh, it's funny -- that's mine.

Round about 1958, there was a gag in my routine where I tried to 'magically' link two solid steel 18" rings together -- stop me if you've seen this -- and by "mistake," one of the rings fastened itself to my suspenders.  Being twelve, I looked quite out of place in my boy-sized tux, more like a short head waiter than a child magician.  Freed from the right suspender, the ring ended up stuck on the left suspender.   My audiences were composed of five and six year olds.  They loved the foolishness.

Laughing and pointing, the boys and girls found my unfortunate situation hysterical.  The kids were laughing at a classic comic moment -- when a person who thinks he knows what he's doing gets himself into harmless trouble.  From time to time, I dust off the old rings and put this routine back into my act.  I've embellished it -- after the suspenders, the ring now gets linked to my wristwatch. Brings down the house.

Kids like it best if the person who mistakenly proceeds against his own interests happens to be an adult, perhaps an authority figure. There is an unspoken agreement between the entertainer and the audience -- comedy situations are not dangerous. Odd behavior and absurd situations don't lead to real-world consequences.  There is no humor in a slip and fall routine if the fallee bleeds.

Audience's love it when I'm baffled by something and the solution is obvious to everyone but me.   They chuckle if a word has two meanings and I'm operating with the wrong definition.  And mostly, they laugh if I am about to get myself into a silly jam.  Anticipation can be very humorous.

More and more young children are being exposed to foreign language immersion classes.  There is some evidence that introducing dual fluency early on sets up high end brain patterns that are uniquely formed at this stage of development.  I hereby submit my early silliness education theory.  Learning to laugh when you are a toddler sets up brain patterns that will upgrade the quality of your entire life. They will help you cope, teach you to see the big picture, and produce endless joyful interactions.

Getting the joke feels good.  When I perform at bedside in a hospital, my puppet begins speaking with the child long before I do.  "Listen, I'll tell you why I'm here," Biscuit The Dog Puppet says to the kid.  "You're a doctor, right? And I happen to have a head ache in my tummy ... once I had a tummy ache in my head instead.  Should I eat chocolate pot pie, or do you think that'll make me cry?"

Somewhere during Biscuit's soliloquy, we can expect a little gleam to appear in the child's eyes. Sickness has been momentarily subdued, crowded out by an attack of funny.

If you've ever looked into someone's eyes to sharing a joke -- communicating soul to soul, you know certain joyful interactions are spiritual.  Helping a child to realize he or she has the ability to experience delight in this very natural way opens a door to options that will come in handy.

Even the most enlightened people fall back again and again into stereotyping others.  Color, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, accent, regional bias, financial or educational stigmas.  But fill a room with every variety of individual, then introduce an outrageously funny joke.  Not political.  Not intellectual. Something basic to the human condition.  For a moment, but with traces that last forever, everybody is infected by the humor bug, everyone is connected.

I ask Bones The Dog Puppet if he can count, and he tells me he can count all the way to one.   "Of course," he admits, sometimes he forgets how to do that.  "You forget how to count to one?"  "Yep, so I skip it and just do two."

That joke worked both before and after New Math.

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Watch Charles The Clown videos online at charlestheclownvideos.com

BY A SHADOW

BY A SHADOW

By Charles Kraus

It is possible to find the view inconsequential, when the next mountain is a problem that reaches beyond the sky.

Even in the bright light, this peak of burden casts a shadow.  And so we are sad, and we do not bother looking out from picture windows.  Some mountains can not be climbed, or moved, or circumvented.  Some are walls, cages, barriers of intensity standing as tombstones, marking our place in the story.

Into this, see a rabbit -- swift, surefooted, small, unimposing.  It rushes forth, fighting its way past troubles that would still some of us.  Under.  Over.  Around.  He does not know the trip is impossible.  He carries my lament in the quickness of his heart.  

I am here, beneath tomorrow, awaiting my cue, poised on a hill, the sun ablaze, the breeze a chorus, the view a dream dashed by a shadow which is the sum of my future, until now.  Listening for the call of a rabbit who races infinity.

Heaven Application / short form

Heaven Application /  short form

By Charles E. Kraus

1.  Why do you want to become a member of our community?

2.  Names of three references (please, no relatives).

3.  Your Good Works history (those of the Jewish persuasion may substitute Mitzvah history).

4.   Religious affiliation(s) (those of the Humanistic persuasion may respond: Ethical Culture,      

      Agnostic, Atheist, Deist or recovering Scientologist ).

5.   Do you have a fear of heights?

6.   Will you be staying with family members?

7.   Do you sing?

8.   Name your favorite author.

9.   Will you be joining a support group, and if so, what issues are of particular interest to you?

10. Do you believe in sex after death?

11  Have you been out of the country in the last 21 days?

12.  Are you conversant with Excel? 

14.  Would you like to be put on the waiting list for reincarnation? 

15.  Do you smoke?

16.  In 30 words or less, tell us something about yourself that makes you proud to be Heavenly.

17.  Summarize your death bed thoughts.

18.  As you expired, did you see a white light?

19.  If your death was not by natural causes, explain the circumstances.  Provide names of all individuals involved, and with regards to perpetrators, indicate whether or not you have forgiven them.

20.  If Hollywood decides to remake The Last Temptation of Christ, how would you cast this feature?

21.  Rate the following people in descending order of significance:

Pope Francis, Albert Einstein, Lenny Bruce, J.D. Salinger, Ethel Waters, Norman Vincent Peal, George Burns, Mel Gibson and Brian Williams.

22.  Tell us how we can make the world a better place.

23.  Do you have an opinion about Gay angels?

24.  Favorite animal

25.  Favorite flower

26.  Favorite televangelist 

BONUS QUESTION:

Discuss — is Noah more famous for the Ark or for bagels?

Upon completing this form, please retain a copy for your records and burn the original.